The Water and the Wild (2 page)

This is better.

Lottie thought that the book was exceptionally boring. She decided not to ask for anything too extravagant in the future.

Not, that is, until Eliot Walsch got very sick.

Lottie and her green apple tree may have been comrades, but it did get lonely talking to a tree, if for no other reason than that the tree never talked back. Even Mrs. Yates
was helpful enough to suggest to Lottie that she should make friends with the kids at her school. The problem with the kids at Lottie's school was that they never talked back to Lottie, either. Lottie did not enjoy chattering about lip gloss and magazines, like the most popular girls. As a result, Pen Bloomfield (of parakeet fame) had called her Oddy Lottie in the fourth grade, and the name had stuck. Lottie's lemony hair didn't help matters much.

Eliot Walsch didn't mind lemony hair. In fact, he quite liked it and made a point to tell Lottie this the day they met at Kemble School. Lottie and Eliot had been best friends ever since. Eliot was odd, too. He liked to paint. He also lived atop a shop his father owned called the Barmy Badger, and it was common knowledge at Kemble School that you couldn't possibly fit in if you lived in a place called barmy or badger, let alone both. The third strike against Eliot, and the one that now kept Lottie Fiske awake at night, was that he was almost always sick. Eliot had been born sick and he had remained sick, no matter how many doctors Mr. Walsch took him to see.

“The strangest thing,” the doctors said at first, “but we've seen worse.”

“Let's run some tests,” others said.

“Let's try this remedy!” still others cried.

But now, twelve years later, Eliot Walsch only ever got one response:

“Incurable,” said the doctors, sadly shaking their heads. “The disease is
incurable
.”

There was only one doctor across the Atlantic who was willing to keep trying, and he said, “Five hundred thousand pounds.”

Mr. Walsch did not have that sort of money in pounds sterling or dollars, so Eliot stayed incurable. He began to get sicker. Much sicker. So sick that he began to miss school. So sick that, on Lottie's twelfth birthday, she wrote through lonely tears and angry sniffs:

I won't ask for anything else ever again, but please cure
Eliot Walsch of the Barmy Badger, New Kemble.
He's my best friend.

Sincerest of sincerelys,
Lottie Fiske

P.S. And don't you dare send me another book by that
Spenser guy! Thanks.

Lottie stuffed the letter into the copper box beneath the green apple tree.

Then she waited.

Six months had passed, and Eliot was still sick. Nothing had changed. Nothing except for the bird.

The morning after she had locked away her tearstained request in the copper box, Lottie had woken up to the chirp of a bird outside her window. It was not a parakeet. It was a finch, and it was perched on her green apple tree.

The finch had feathers of the purest white, like crisp sidewalk snow before the shovelers get to it. This, however, was not the most remarkable thing about the bird. Every so often, the finch would appear, perch on the green apple tree, and sing songs that Lottie was almost sure she recognized. It would, in fact, oblige Lottie with a song whenever she opened her window. This habit had begun to result in confrontations between Lottie and Mrs. Yates, who did not approve of any of her boarders (orphans included) opening their windows on rainy days and letting in the wet.

On the rainy September Tuesday on which this story truly begins, Lottie's window was wide open, and she was getting ready for school to the twittered tune of what sounded a lot like “Here We Go 'Round the Mulberry Bush.”

Lottie had just pulled her tweed coat over her school uniform when Mrs. Yates, as was her custom, threw open Lottie's door without a knock. Mrs. Yates looked at the open window. She looked at Lottie. She marched to the window, slammed it shut, and informed Lottie that a prospective boarder was coming over that night for a tour and that Lottie should at least
attempt
to behave decently if sighted on the premises, but that it'd be best if she wasn't sighted at all. Lottie blinked, sneezed, and nodded. Mrs. Yates left the room. This was the extent of Lottie Fiske's relationship with Mrs. Yates.

Lottie sneezed again. There was something about tweed that made her nose itch, but she refused to wear any coat other than this one. It was periwinkle, Lottie's favorite color, and periwinkle was hard to come by around Thirsby Square.

Lottie Fiske, like most sharp and odd persons in this world, was having a miserable school experience. She had the audacity to not be very pretty or rich or even stupid, and at least one of these qualities was essential for a girl in a place like Kemble School. She actually answered questions when called on by her teachers, and though her answers weren't always right, the awful thing was that Lottie
cared
. You could not care at Kemble School and get away with it. Girls like Pen Bloomfield would sniff you out, usually by the school bike racks, and call you things like Oddy Lottie.

On the days when Pen sniffed her out, though, Lottie reminded herself that she had a plan. She and Eliot had made it on the catwalk in the rafters of the school auditorium, while the other kids had been auditioning below for the school musical.

“Look here,” Eliot had said over Bert Sotheby's squeaky attempt to reach a glass-cracking note, “you're smart as tacks, Lottie, and all I want to do is paint. If we get good grades here, we could get into any school we want to. We could go to a university far away from here.”

They had spat and shaken on it. They were going to get scholarships, they were going to study in Boston first thing out of Kemble School, and they were never going to look back at their school days except to say, “Remember when that old hag Pen Bloomfield didn't take us seriously!”

That future all depended on Eliot. He and Lottie had made this pact together, and they were going to see it through together. His sickness was not going to change the plan. But where
was
Eliot? Lottie looked around anxiously in her first class of the day, but Eliot was not in his seat or anywhere else to be found.

“Walsch, Eliot. Absent.”

Mr. Kidd, Lottie's English teacher, marked the last name off of roll.
Absent
. For the fourth time this month. It was the sickness. Lottie scribbled on the tip of her notebook paper as Mr. Kidd rumbled on about Irish poetry. The sickness had to go. It was ruining everything. Ruining their plans, ruining Eliot's laugh, ruining Eliot's life. Ruining her concentration! What
had
Mr. Kidd been chanting?

“Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.”

Lottie looked at the penciled spirals and squares on her notebook paper. No notes. She wasn't going to get good grades this way. “
Come away, come away
,” repeated Mr. Kidd's voice in her head, even as the last bell of the school day clattered out its shrill song down the Kemble School hallways.

Lottie had ridden her bike to school in the rain that morning because Mrs. Yates had been too busy knitting to drive her. It was still drizzling outside when Lottie left school and got to the bike racks. Pen Bloomfield was already there, leaned up against Lottie's bike. A few other girls were twittering around Pen; when they saw Lottie they hushed. They had been waiting for her.

“I was just telling the girls,” Pen announced, “how sad it is that some girls have to ride their bikes in the rain. I feel so
sad
for you, Lottie, how you don't have
real
parents to take care of you.”

Pen had learned a new way to be mean over the summer break: she said the same old mean things, but now she said them
sympathetically
. She'd discovered that pity and a tearful sniffle could make nasty remarks even nastier.

Lottie's eyes frowned at Pen, but her lips smiled. That was how things were done at Kemble School. Girls smiled when they were angry, and they pretended to be concerned when they were really being cruel.

“I'd like to get my bike,
please,
” Lottie said politely, though she felt more like kicking a puddle of rainwater onto Pen's perfectly pressed uniform, “and you're in the way.”

Pen moved out of the way, but as she did so, she caught Lottie by the shoulder. Leaning forward, she placed her lips to the curl of Lottie's ear.

“
Hushed-up
parents,” she whispered, “make for
blushed-up
girls.” Pulling away, Pen asked, “Do you know what that means? It means nothing good ever comes from filth.”

“My parents,” Lottie said, “were not filth.”

“Everyone knows that your mom wasn't an islander,” said Pen. “She was from the mainland. Maybe even
Canada
. Doesn't get much filthier than that.”

Anger had been growing in Lottie like rising dough threatening to spill over the sides of its pan, and she knew
what would happen if the dough did spill: she would have another one of her bad spells. Lottie called them bad spells, even though she knew that the real term for them was “panic attacks.” It was an ugly adult term that she had heard the doctor use at her last checkup.

Lottie had gotten the bad spells since she was a little girl. First, they had only come at night, when she woke from bad dreams about her parents. They came oftener and oftener now. She didn't need to feel frightened or inadequate anymore for them to brew up, just angry with Pen Bloomfield.

“So,” Pen went on, “where's your friend, Sir Coughs-a-Lot?”

“Why?” Lottie's hands trembled as she unlocked her bike chain. “You don't care about Eliot.”

“No,” said Pen, “I don't. I was just hoping that he'd gone ahead and”—she snapped her fingers—“already.” It's getting so tedious to have to listen to lectures over his wheezing. I'm pretty sure it wasn't Napoleon Coughaparte who was exiled to Elba, but that's what I've got in my notes.”

“Take better notes.” Lottie stuffed the bike chain into her backpack.

“Come on, Oddy Lottie,” Pen snorted. “Can't take a joke? I thought you'd be relieved to know that there's someone more pathetic at school than you: that stupid Walsch boy.”

Lottie turned calmly around. Then she rammed her head into Penelope Bloomfield's gut.

Pen's friends shrieked in horror. Lottie felt dizzy but satisfied. She scrambled to get ahold of her bike just as Pen's fist flew up and caught the side of Lottie's mouth, knocking soundly into her teeth. Lottie ducked against the pain and pushed her bike out of the circle of girls.

“Don't you ever,” she sputtered, recklessly mounting her bike, “
ever
breathe another word about Eliot!”

“Well, I won't have to, will I?” Pen shrieked after Lottie, staggering back to her feet with the help of her friends. “Not for much longer! Not once he's
dead
!”